Organizing Schemes for the Two Modes, 1687–1722

Abstract

Abstract +It is the two modes’ organization that makes them a system. This chapter considers the organization of major–minor key listings in twenty-four treatises between Speer’s 1687 Grundrichtiger Unterricht, the first continental treatise listing the major and minor keys apart from another modal scheme, and Rameau’s 1722 Traité de l’harmonie, a book inaugurating a new era in harmonic theory. In these two-mode treatises, we encounter three organizing schemes: (1) stepwise by final, whether diatonic or chromatic (2) first by type of key, and then stepwise by final; and (3) by increasing signature and/or the circle of fifths. In all three organizing schemes, major and minor keys are sometimes integrated and sometimes listed separately. If the north German theorists Werckmeister and Heinichen led the way in circular organization between and within keys, their French counterparts Ozanam and Saint-Lambert clarified the notion of the two modes as abstract, freely transposable scales, with Loulié uniting signature, heptachordal syllables, and key in the conventions still used today. Heinichen’s circle of fifths and Campion’s rule of the octave produced new conceptions of tonal space, premised on transpositional equivalent of keys and consolidation of voice-leading norms, as well as identification of chord functions. Tonal circularity, which since antiquity had reflected music’s kinship with the spatial-temporal disciplines of the quadrivium, now became instrumental in the creation of a new musical grammar, and indeed new expressions of musical logic and rhetoric. Thus the shift from modes to keys corresponds to a complete transformation of the language of Western music.